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A comment on 50 U.S. states and territories announce broad antitrust investigation of Google. Parent comment

Re:50 U.S. states and territories announce broad antitrust i... by 8ytecoder on Monday September 09, 2019 @06:17PM (#20923083)
In my very humble opinion, services that are offered for free should also be investigated for anti-trust practices. Google comes up with Gmail - phenomenally better than other services of its time - kills all viable competition and the let it languish or even degrades the experience. No one can compete with free. Result is that email as a platform is slowly languishing with no real improvements.
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Re:50 U.S. states and territories announce broad antitrust i... by aviraldg on Monday September 09, 2019 @07:57PM (#20923829)
If you kill off free and ad supported services[0], you take away the ability of a large fraction of the world's population to use the internet. People using 3-4 USD/month prepaid internet packs to communicate using Facebook and Whatsapp, and these days, even finding jobs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20556346)

HN's default position of "burn the ads with fire", therefore, has always struck me as a very privileged position that fails to take into account users from all around the world. And guess what? If the kind of people who usually post here succeed in forcing through that opinion, that is what most of the world will have to deal with too, since Silicon Valley drives so much of tech.

[0] Although, it is unlikely that advertisers are really targeting the kind of users I'm talking about, so in effect these users are being subsidized by others.

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Re:50 U.S. states and territories announce broad antitrust i... by 8ytecoder on Monday September 09, 2019 @08:51PM (#20924131)
WhatsApp’s original model was $1 a year. That would have been a reasonable fee even for most developing countries. Job posting sites make money from the poster and don’t have to be ad supported.
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Re:50 U.S. states and territories announce broad antitrust i... by ballark on Monday September 09, 2019 @09:53PM (#20924460)
What would a $1 a year model do in terms of opening the market up to competition? That seems like the worst of both worlds, no additional competition, and we make these difficult for those without much money.
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Re:50 U.S. states and territories announce broad antitrust i... by scarface74 on Tuesday September 10, 2019 @12:05AM (#20924952)
Were they profitable with that model?
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Re:50 U.S. states and territories announce broad antitrust i... by snovv_crash on Tuesday September 10, 2019 @01:36AM (#20925306)
They only had 30 employees when they were acquired. I'd say yes.
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Re:50 U.S. states and territories announce broad antitrust i... by d1zzy on Monday September 09, 2019 @07:23PM (#20923605)
So as a company better to just not provide a great free service or a service that is largely better than the competition because if it's too successful then you get blamed for not keeping it updated.
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Re:50 U.S. states and territories announce broad antitrust i... by cromwellian on Tuesday September 10, 2019 @06:33AM (#20926742)
Yahoo and Hotmail were the market leaders offering free email at the time. They set the price to $0 first.
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Re:50 U.S. states and territories announce broad antitrust i... by scarface74 on Tuesday September 10, 2019 @12:04AM (#20924951)
So I guess we should ban HN....
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